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Finishing 0.8 Part VII

This week has been a week of consolidating everything that was in place so far, continuing to test and refine and test and refine over and over the speech generation and the flow of sentences, moving around some of the code so that it can be handled more efficiently, and thinking about handling sentence variables in the future, which is to say, the parts of sentences which are things like “[god]” or “[nation]”, and therefore have to vary every time the same sentence is uttered. As such, here’s this week’s fairly substantial update:

Thanks to some great suggestions left in the comments list in the blog post from two weeks ado, I’ve added in a number of new responses. If you’re asking someone about a potentially suspicious topic, and you’re in a region with guards, they might (if they really like you) say something like “You shouldn’t ask such things, the guards will think you’re a spy!” or something of that sort.

Equally, if you’re asking a particularly “academic” rather than “practical” topic – the difference between “what is the nearest mountain range?” and “what is your religion?” – they will sometimes, very rarely, say “I don’t know, but you should go and ask [expert]”. I think these are both great changes, and again, add even more speech detail to the potential library of sentences the player will actually encounter. However, again, to prevent farming, there’s now basically a hidden counter, which varies significantly from iteration to iteration, and affects how often people will recommend that you go and talk to somebody else about the topic in question; equally, you need to be talking to people who both a) have the knowledge and b) have the inclination to recommend an expert, which will be a fairly small number of NPCs.

I then spent quite a bit more time developing the above in order to maximise the detail that people can offer the player, the variation in the sentences the player will read, and integrating all of this will knowledge and mood modifiers. So, now, if you hang around in a shop, and then a random person comes in, and you ask that person about the currency of their nation, for example, if they don’t want to respond they will point you towards the merchant in that shop, knowing that a) they and you are in a shop and b) you are asking a question that it would be relevant to talk to a merchant about and c) there is also a merchant in this shop.

These responses also vary depending on whether you’re in the nation or church relevant to the person you’re speaking to. So let’s say you ask someone something, and the relevant answer would be “You should ask a noble”. If you’re in the mansion of a noble from their civilization, they’ll say “You should ask a noble, such as the one in this mansion” or whatever; but if you’re elsewhere, they’ll say “You should ask one of our nobles, who dwell in accommodations like these”; if you’re right nation but outside and in the right district, they’ll say “You should ask a noble; several have their mansions here”, or in wrong distract, they’ll say “You should ask a noble; many dwell in our richest district”. Equivalents in a foreign nation would be “You should ask one of our nobles, who dwell in a district much like this”, or “You should ask one of our nobles, who inhabit the richest part of my home city”. The game can therefore now generate appropriate sentences both based on the player’s location – right building, right district, or just overall right region, or overall incorrect region – and the relationship between the person you’re talking to and the area you’re talking to them in (especially relevant when you run into people who aren’t native to the state they live in, for example).

I have to be honest and say that I’m extremely happy with how this context-specific recommendation system has developed; I’m really hoping this will produce some strikingly specific procedurally-generated sentences for the player to encounter in appropriate situations, and as ever, just generally provide greater variety in the conversation system. There are also a bunch of sentence possibilities which might be generated that I know are currently impossible, but might become possible later once the potential actions and schedules of NPCs expands further.

Going back to repeating questions, if you ask X, and then you ask X again, sometimes on the first repetition people will now be confused rather than annoyed or bothered; they’ll say “Didn’t we just discuss this?”, or “That’s strange, didn’t I just answer that?” or something like that; the potential mood drop will be the same, I think, but it’s just another little bit of detail for some NPCs.

Thanks to an outstanding suggestions left on the Bay12 forums, there is now a little bit of extra conversation detail in there which I hadn’t thought of. If you ask something, and get a positive response (they answer your question), when you say the next thing you say, it’ll normally start your next question with “Thanks” or “Understood” or “I appreciate you letting me know” or things of that sort; equally, if they didn’t reply, your next thing will often start with “Apologies” or “Ah, okay” or things of that sort. This adds a nice little bit of extra flow to the conversations; naturally even more flow will be added once they can ask you questions back, but for the time being, putting these in 50% of responses definitely makes everything look a little more human once more.

Next week’s blog entry will be a little different: I’m in the final fortnight of the extension period on my first book, and this week’s absolute priority is finishing that off. Next week I’m going to have the first non-URR entry since development restarted and write up some reflections on writing such a long piece of work about games, what I’ve learned from it, my future writing plans, and so forth; there’s just no way I’ll have more than a little time in the coming week for programming, and I’d rather return with a blast the week after. See you all next week!

It’s an interesting one… but probably a lot of extra effort. I think I’d only wind up doing that if someone else would do all the hard graft of extracting the stuff from the game, and then I’d give them a %, or something.